Four Factors Threaten to ‘Kill’ Russian Science, Moscow Scholars Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 23 – In the month since Aleksandr Sergeyev, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published his critique of the reasons why Russian science is dying (vedomosti.ru/society/characters/2021/09/19/887313-bez-nauki-nikuda), otFour Factors Threaten to ‘Kill’ Russian Science, Moscow Scholars Sayher Russian scholars have suggested the situation may be even worse than he indicated.

            Rosbalt journalist Leonid Smirnov has drawn on his and their comments to suggest that four factors are working to prevent scholarship in Russia from playing the role it should: underfinancing, lack of business interest in research, massive emigration of scholars, and bureaucratic “squabbling” (rosbalt.ru/moscow/2021/10/23/1927659.html).

            Not only has the government cut spending for research, they say; but Moscow is now preventing Russian scholars from accepting foreign grants. Those grants were the primary reason that in the 1990s and early 2000s that Russian researchers were able to maintain themselves. Now access to foreign grants is being foreclosed without any sign of new domestic funding.

            Russian businesses aren’t interested in making up the gap because they are so uncertain as to what their situation will be in the future that they are not supporting long-term basic research and instead are assuming that what they need now can be imported from abroad even though that source too is becoming more and more difficult to access because of sanctions.

            Because the situation in Russian scholarship is so dire, ever more researchers are emigrating. Abroad they can continue their work in ways that are not possible in Putin’s Russia. That is especially true in the social sciences where ideological restrictions are being reimposed and hard sciences where the costs of equipment are dauntingly high.

            And all three of these problems, Smirnov says, are being compounded by bureaucratic “squabbling” among the Academy of Sciences and various government agencies. As a result, scholarship is being strangled, new ideas are not emerging, and 85 percent of Russians can’t name a single contemporary Russian scholar.